With today's technology, a user may use a client device to view a map having displayable points-of-interest. These points-of-interest may include businesses, parks, recreational facilities, landmarks, distinguishing geographical features, or any other type of points-of-interest. However, on any given map, there are generally many more points-of-interest to display on the map than can be displayed on the client device without making the map hopelessly cluttered.
One approach to assist the client device in displaying as many points-of-interest at one time for a given zoom level is to use a ranking scheme to determine those points-of-interest that are more prominent than other points-of-interest. Hence, a typical ranking scheme may cause the client device to display points-of-interest that are more prominent than other points-of-interest depending on a zoom level for viewing the map displayed on the client device. However, under this scheme, a point-of-interest that is considered less prominent and is near a more prominent point-of-interest may never be displayed on the client device.
Moreover, because larger cities may have more points-of-interest that are of greater prominence than those of smaller cities, a system that determines which points-of-interest to display at a given time must also account for the local distribution of prominent points-of-interest in small cities as well as the local distribution of prominent points-of-interest in large cities. For example, a displaying scheme based on the ranks of features in New York City that produces an adequate distribution of points-of-interest across a high zoom level to a low zoom level, may also likely show few, if any, points-of-interest at lesser zoom levels in smaller cities.
Attempting to address the issues above by attempting to show everything at a shallow zoom level, then simply allowing higher-ranked points-of-interest to occlude nearby lower-ranked points-of-interest to reduce the clutter of having multiple points-of-interest displayed at one time reveals a more subtle problem: In such a scenario, it will be a common occurrence for a point-of-interest of a certain rank to be occluded by nearby, higher-ranked, local points-of-interest and yet another nearby point-of-interest of similar rank will not be so occluded, merely because it happens to not be near a higher-ranked point-of-interest.